Wikipedia Sociographics

The lecture reports on social dynamics of the Wikipedia project and presents a bunch of statistics and results of research exploring the inner workings of the project.

The general media normally describes Wikipedia as an encyclopedia project in which anyone can edit any page at any time. This is true, but does not give an understanding of how the community actually functions. The community has a complex web of relationships and beliefs. My research into statistical measures of those relationships, when compared with community self-descriptions, suggests that not only does the media not understand wikipedia, we actually may not understand ourselves.

Jimmy Wales has done research into clustering wikipedia users into various 'types' based on their editing and relationship patterns. Since most wikipedians tend to run into their own type, the results are somewhat surprising to almost everyone, because we don't normally see the community from a distance, since we are in it. He'll present graphs and charts, and hopefully some visualizations that make these things conceptually clear, if he can find someone to help him with the visualization software. :-)